Orthodox church blocks funeral for last of Romanov Remains

Feb. 14, 2016

Updated 5:00 a.m.

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A cross marks the ground at the site of the Ganina Yama mine, outside the city of Yekaterinburg, Russia, in the Urals, long thought to be the burial place of the murdered royal Romanov family's ashes, June 26, 2008. The Russian Orthodox Church has again interceded a scheduled funeral for the family, questioning — not for the first time — whether any of the remains were authentic, and the service was postponed indefinitely. JAMES HILL , THE NEW YORK TIMES

A cross marks the ground at the site of the Ganina Yama mine, outside the city of Yekaterinburg, Russia, in the Urals, long thought to be the burial place of the murdered royal Romanov family's ashes, June 26, 2008. The Russian Orthodox Church has again interceded a scheduled funeral for the family, questioning — not for the first time — whether any of the remains were authentic, and the service was postponed indefinitely. JAMES HILL , THE NEW YORK TIMES

MOSCOW – Ever since the remains of the last czar, Nicholas II, and most of his family were exhumed 25 years ago from a dirt road in the Urals, investigators, historians and surviving members of the Romanov dynasty have anticipated the day when all the murdered royals would be laid to rest.

They thought that moment had finally arrived when a funeral was scheduled last October for two long-lost children — Czarevitch Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria, whose remains were found in nearby woods many years later.

But it was not to be. The Russian Orthodox Church interceded, questioning — not for the first time — whether any of the remains were authentic, and the service was postponed indefinitely. The nearly 100-year saga of murder, mystery and myth lived on.

“The problem is that from the historical, scientific and genetic point of view, it is absolutely clear that the remains of the czar and his family are authentic,” said Sergei V. Chapnin, who was fired as editor of The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate in December, partly, he thinks, because he pushed for accepting the remains. “The only statement we hear from the church is, ‘We don’t believe it.’”

Why the church rejects the evidence assembled thus far, filling some 25 volumes, is one enduring mystery at the center of the case. Senior church officials have never fully explained it; they keep demanding further efforts.

“The church is interested no less than anyone else, and maybe even more than anyone else, to determine the truth in this complicated issue,” Vladimir R. Legoyda, a church spokesman, said at a news conference late last year. “There are questions that still remain and serious ones. So far we just touched the tip of the iceberg.”

In 2000, the church canonized the royal family, upping the ante for authenticating the remains and possibly imposing new funeral rites, in that the relics of saints must be preserved above ground.

“We need to rule out any possibility of a mistake,” Legoyda said.

At the same news conference, Bishop Tikhon, a shadowy, influential Orthodox figure rumored to be the spiritual guide for President Vladimir V. Putin, cast doubt on the authenticity of the bones by describing various untested theories, as did a historian endorsed by the church.

To take just one of the more outlandish claims, the bishop hinted that the grave of Nicholas’ father, Czar Alexander III, had been vandalized and his bones interred in place of his son.

That theory was quickly disproved. An excavation found Alexander III’s grave had remained undisturbed since his burial in 1894, said Sergei V. Mironenko, the head of the Russian State Archives, which has also been closely involved in the investigation. It was the third time royal bones had been dug up in the course of the investigation.

Nevertheless, Tikhon suggested on state television in late December that the church investigation was just getting started. “Today we were assured that the scientists will have all the time that they need — let’s say it will be approximately two, three years — but these tests will be carried out professionally and in full,” he said, without specifying what testing or who would be doing it.

The bishop was not available for interviews. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, said at a conference of bishops this month that Putin himself had consented to an open-ended inquiry by the church.

Virtually every expert involved in the case agrees that investigators have pieced together a plausible explanation of what happened to the family, while the church has failed to produce an alternative.

“It is one of the oddest detective stories in Russian history in the last century,” said Ksenia V. Luchenko, a freelance journalist with long experience covering Orthodox Church matters.

Early in the morning of July 17, 1918, the czar, his wife, their five children, as well as their doctor, a cook and two servants, were executed in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg, in central Russia. The firing squad had the most difficulty killing the czar’s four daughters, because the bullets ricocheted off all the hidden diamonds sewn into their clothing.

In a series of steps that took investigators decades to determine, the executioners first dumped the corpses in a mine, named Ganina Yama in Russian, which had long been thought to be the burial place of their ashes.

The bodies of the 11 victims were actually loaded onto a truck for transport to a deeper mine, however. The vehicle got stuck on a muddy road through a bog. To lighten the load, the bodies of Alexei and Maria were removed and carted off into the forest — burned, doused with acid and buried. The Bolsheviks then decided to inter the rest right there in Old Kaptikovskaya Road.

That main grave was eventually discovered in 1979 by amateur sleuths, and the bodies were finally exhumed in 1991, after the Soviet Union collapsed. The government treated it as a criminal case, assigning it to Vladimir N. Solovyov, at the time a 40-year-old investigator.

It took a year to assemble the skeletons from the jumbled collection of bones, especially since the executioners had tried to disguise the victims by smashing their faces. “The skulls had to be glued together like an antique vase from many small bits,” said Solovyov, now 65 and still working the case.

In a stroke of luck for the anthropologists doing the work, the czar’s daughters had contracted measles in March 1917 and posed together with shaved heads. The markedly different contours of their skulls were readily visible, speeding identification.

Fragments from the skeletons were shipped to Britain and the United States for DNA testing in government laboratories, Solovyov said, which confirmed the victims’ identities.

The historical and genetic proof gradually undermined the accumulated myths surrounding the execution, such as the longstanding legend that Grand Duchess Anastasia had somehow escaped. She had not.

In 1998, in St. Petersburg, Nicholas II; his wife, Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna; daughters Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia; and the four retainers killed with them were buried together in St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, where all the czars since Peter the Great lie.

The patriarch at that time, Aleksei II, skipped the funeral at the last minute, rejecting the evidence with no explanation. The Orthodox priests who presided did not refer to the deceased by name, saying, “God knows their identity.”

Alexei and Maria were to be buried in the same grave. Their bone fragments had been tucked away for years inside two small white boxes the size of FedEx mailers, sealed with crime-scene tape and locked into a vault in the state archives in downtown Moscow.

That would seem to have settled things, but the church took custody of the remains in December, declaring for reasons that remain elusive that the case required further study.

“They follow this mythological idea that the state is trying to convince the church that the remains are real although they are false,” Chapnin said. “What reason would the state have to do that? Nobody knows! People are just against it and that is it, they are not ready for any discussion.”

The most prevalent explanation is that the hierarchy wants to avoid the decision because either choice would alienate key factions.

Rejecting the bones will anger some Orthodox adherents, particularly those outside Russia. Accepting them will incense a conservative domestic faction that believes the Soviet government somehow faked the burial.

“Either decision will cause a scandal, so they would like to postpone it,” Chapnin said.

Analysts of church affairs place Patriarch Kirill among the doubters, but his reasons remain opaque. Andrei B. Zubov, a renowned historian, said he knew the prelate well enough to engage him on any matter, but when Zubov asked about the czar’s remains, he changed the subject.

“It was a political decision, not a spiritual or scientific one,” said Zubov, adding that after years of opposition, the church could not suddenly reverse itself without losing face.

Still, the idea that the church wants to begin an investigation from scratch provokes exasperation.

“They have all kinds of strange ideas why they are not the right remains,” said Paul E. Kulikovsky, 55, a businessman in Moscow who is a great-great-grandson of Czar Alexander III. “If you investigate all the possibilities, that means you have to go on for 100 years because people have come up with 1,000 possibilities.”

The Canadian-born Kulikovsky, who publishes a monthly newsletter on Romanov affairs, said the vast majority of about 80 Romanov descendants hope to bury Alexei and Maria this winter, whether or not the church deemed the bones authentic.

Luchenko, the journalist, noted that in death, the two prime adversaries of the 1917 Revolution — the czar and Lenin — are both stuck in limbo.

There has been an endless debate whether the embalmed body of Lenin should be removed from his tomb in Red Square and buried, while the remains of Nicholas II might be preserved above ground if they are ever recognized as holy relics.

Together, the remains represent the unfinished business of a particularly violent, tumultuous century for Russia. Luchenko said, “Russia cannot say goodbye to its 20th century.”

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